OIO Publisheris an ad manager tool available as a plugin for WordPress powered websites. It allows you to eliminate the middle man by directly selling the ads through your website. It handles reporting, payments, tracking, and much more. You can create ad zones of different sizes and types on your website. You can choose how many ads to display in each zone, select a price, rotation factor, targeting, and much more.

As a plugin, OIO is pretty straight forward to use. Depending on the placement of the ad, you might have to edit the WordPress theme to place the zone code generated by OIO. OIO PublisherWordPress plugin comes with a sidebar widget, so you can easily add ad zones into your sidebar. The plugin is actively maintained and has an active user base. Since it is a premium plugin, there are a number of support options available as well.

We are using OIO Publisheron WPBeginner.

We have previously covered how to sell ads in your WordPress blog using BuySellAds. If you are already selling ads on your site and need a more powerful solution then BuySellAds Pro is a good solution. It provides you an easy to use Graphical User Interface to sell, serve, and manage ads on your site. Comparatively, BuySellAds Pro is expensive than WordPress plugins like OIO Publisherhowever BuySellAds helps you connect with the advertisers which increases your earning potential enough to justify the cost.

Google Double Click for Publishers or Google DFP is a web based ad selling and serving platform for small businesses. Powered by Google, DFP gets an edge over other platforms in terms of reliability and cost effectiveness. It also allows you to sell your ads and run competition for the same ad spots on Adsense or other third party advertisement networks. DFP will automatically choose the best paying ad for the spot and serve it. Google DFP also has good reporting tools that allow you to measure ad performance more accurately than other solutions.

Despite it’s effectiveness, it is a bit complicated to get started with. We are using it on List25, but our advertising partners helped us get started.

AdSanityis a simple light weight WordPress ad management plugin focused on ease-of-use. Adding new ads in Adsanity is very similar to adding a post. It comes with with widgets and shortcodes support to display ads, so you can display ads in sidebars, posts and pages. You can create either time-based ads (that run for a specific time) or infinite ads (that would keep running unless you remove them). It also has graphs and stats for ad views and clicks. AdSanity is probably the right fit for those who prefer simplicity and don’t want to spend too much time on discovering features.

WP125 is simple solution for websites serving ads in 125×125 boxes. It offers a simple interface for you to upload ads on your site. The settings page allow you to set number of ad slots, columns, and a default ad-sale page. The ad sale page is the page with the information for advertisers about how they can advertise on your site, pricing and statistics. You can create a page in WordPress, write a good sales copy and link it from your default ad image.

Adrotate is a powerful WordPress plugin to manage and serve ads on your website. Adrotate comes in two flavors, the basic version is available for free to download from WordPress plugin repository. The basic version is good enough to run and serve ads. However, the pro version has more advanced features. Adrotate allows you to create ad groups and blocks to better manage your inventory. It also enables advertisers to submit their ad creative for you to approve. It has a reporting page where you can see the performance of each ad. Check out this article to learn how to manage ads in WordPress with Ad Rotate plugin.

Simple Ads Manager is a free WordPress plugin for bloggers to server and manage ads on their website. Even though it is named simple, the plugin is very powerful and full of options. Simple Ads Manager comes with a unique feature called flexible logic which rotates ads based on weight. It can be used to your own ads, third party ads or use Google DFP. It also ads a button in the post editor so that you can insert ads inside posts and pages.

So now that we have listed all of them, which is the best solution? Well it really depends on your needs. When we first started using OIO Publisher on WPBeginner, we actually used a lot of it’s features (multiple ad zones, direct sells, etc). Now we only have one zone that rotate 300×250 banners. For some thing simple like that, do you really need to purchase OIO? Probably not. If you have multiple zones, and you want to track subscription payments, auto-expire ads, etc, then definitely get OIO Publisher.

Are you selling ads on a eCPM model and want to control the bidding structure? Do you have the time to spend and learn the setup? If the answer is yes, then use Google DFP. If you don’t have the time to set things up and have your own advertising agent. Then use BuySellAds Pro.

If you are just starting out on a new blog, then don’t spend the money to buy an ad solution. Use one of the free solutions that we mentioned above.

We hope that this article helped you find an ad management solution for your WordPress site. Let us know what you are using to serve and manage ads on your WordPress site by leaving a comment below.